Halloween is just around the corner, so I thought I'd write something that's been on my mind for a while. For me, zombies are possibly the scariest Hollywood monster ever conceived. They plague my dreams and make me wake up in a cold sweat. Why, you ask?
The reanimated dead already play a roll in our collective psyche, which is why vampires are popular in the larger monster mythos. But there's something more disturbing about a zombie to me, because it represents primal savagery and enslavement to your base urges. The zombie story is a tale of the id versus the ego, a look into the nature of humanity. Losing the ability to reason and losing control over your desires is frightening, because it means losing that which makes a person human. A zombie is like a wild animal, but worse.
An animal can often be deterred, but a zombie only has one desire, one driving thought, and that is to feed. It will fulfill this desire by any means necessary; the only way to stop a zombie is to kill it. Again.
Facing a relentless enemy that doesn't know reason, fear, pain, or remorse is scary enough, but then we have to consider how zombies are made. Infection occurs rapidly and spreads rampantly through a bite or a scratch, and in no time at all, hordes of the walking dead are swarming the streets. When this happens, at any moment a person could go from a reasoning being to a complete savage capable of infecting others. There's no hope of a cure. All that person once was ceases to be. Scarier still, the infection does not discriminate. Man, woman, child, black, white, yellow, red, or brown, it does not matter.
Then there's the emotional and moral dilemmas survivors must face while dealing with zombies. Survival situations can bring out the worst behavior in people. No one likes to think they'd be the person to trip their best friend while running from zombies, but if your life depended on it, would you? Would you kill someone for their food or their weapons if it meant that your family might survive another month? You may say no, but do you know that for sure? In the beginning, I mentioned that the zombie itself is a representation of the id, but in the fight for survival, humans also battle internally with the id. When faced with the choice between life or death, our true nature comes out, and we may not be as noble as we think.
One final point - I mentioned before that the infection does not discriminate. We see in zombie movies two types of people. The first is the stone-cold zombie killer, determined to survive and resolved to the fact that zombies are but shades of their former selves and cannot be helped. The second is the person who hesitates to fight because when they look at a zombie they can't help but see family, friends, and neighbors - people they once knew and loved. We always say to the second person, "Kill them! What are you waiting for?!" But what would you do? How would you act if you were staring down the barrel at someone you loved? What if that monster was your mother or your father? What if it was your own precious child, or your beloved spouse? Could you look them in their now soulless eyes and blow them straight to Hell? Could you really? If you did, could you live with that image stuck in your head for the rest of your life? What would stop you from, in your grief, turning the gun on yourself? I have turned these questions over in my mind a hundred times, and honestly, I have no answer for them. That, more than anything, is why zombies scare me to death.
